Baseball Game Simulator in Python

Runs 1000 simulations between two lineups

Name: Junsoo Derek Shin

Date: 13 June 2017

Note:

• I wrote this program to try Python while doing something fun for me.
• It currently lacks good structure, such as object-oriented principles.
• I'm planning on fixing the structure, adding more details, and eventually hosting it online.

Running this program:

python baseball.py lineup1.txt lineup2.txt

For the lineup files, put team name (any string is fine), full names of 9 batters, full name of a pitcher, separated by commas and in single line.

For example:

Astros, George Springer, Alex Bregman, Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa, Yulieski Gurriel, Brian McCann, Marwin Gonzalez, Josh Reddick, Dallas Keuchel, Dallas Keuchel

Important Notes:

• Players with the same names don't work right now (for 2017, Chris Young was the only such name).

• In the batter and pitcher files, I manually stripped strange characters from the "Name" column title.

• In the league file, I manually stripped strange characters from the "Season" column title.

Data sources:

• 2017 Batting (2017FanGraphsBatting.csv)

  http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=0&type=0&season=2017&month=0&season1=2017&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0

• 2017 Pitching (2017FanGraphsPitching.csv)

  http://www.fangraphs.com/leaderssplits.aspx?splitArr=&strgroup=season&statgroup=1&startDate=2017-3-1&endDate=2017-10-1&filter=IP%7Cgt%7C0&position=P&statType=player&autoPt=true&sort=19,-1&pg=0

• 2017 League (2017FanGraphsLeague.csv)

  http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=0&type=0&season=2017&month=0&season1=2017&ind=0&team=0,ss&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0

• 2016 Play-by-play and Retrosheet BEVENT software (2016plays.txt)

  http://www.retrosheet.org/game.htm

  http://www.retrosheet.org/tools.htm

  http://www.retrosheet.org/datause.txt

Sources:

• Overall guide and inspiration

  http://www.hardballtimes.com/10-lessons-i-learned-from-creating-a-baseball-simulator/

• The Odds Ratio Method

  http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/the_odds_ratio_method/

• Python-related sources

  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9282967/how-to-open-a-file-using-the-open-with-statement https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14091387/creating-a-dictionary-from-a-csv-file https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10712002/create-an-empty-list-in-python-with-certain-size https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39345995/how-does-python-return-multiple-values-from-a-function https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4071396/split-by-comma-and-strip-whitespace-in-python https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34053257/multiple-variables-for-loop-python https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13784192/creating-an-empty-pandas-dataframe-then-filling-it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3162271/get-loop-count-inside-a-python-for-loop https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6667201/how-to-define-two-dimensional-array-in-python https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4930404/how-do-get-more-control-over-loop-increments-in-python https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8244915/how-do-you-divide-each-element-in-a-list-by-an-int https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_break_statement.htm https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4265988/generate-random-numbers-with-a-given-numerical-distribution

• getting a list of keys and a list of values from a dictionary (tried to get rid of the total before putting the lists into choice() method, but the way I'm doing doesn't seem to be stable.) (list comprehension with a condition doens't work because it removes both total and a result if that result is the only one.)

  https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3106/ https://docs.python.org/3.6/tutorial/datastructures.html#dictionaries

• Ways to avoid chain indexing and use multi-axes indexing (df['a']['b'] vs. df.loc['a','b'])

  http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/indexing.html#indexing-view-versus-copy https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41253170/whats-the-alternative-to-pandas-chain-indexing https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21463589/pandas-chained-assignments

Things to be implemented in the future:

There are a lot of things to include in the baseball simulator, but pitcher management is the next thing to tackle, since, right now, I assume that the starting pitcher completes the entire game.